5 ms·

This argument hinges rather strongly on whether or not AI is going to create a broad, durable, and lasting unemployment effect. Tractors did not cause this phe

by ashleyn 10mo ago

This argument hinges rather strongly on whether or not AI is going to create a broad, durable, and lasting unemployment effect. Tractors did not cause this phenomenon because jevons paradox kicked in and induced demand rendered the problem moot, or demand eventually exceeded what mere tractors were capable of doing for agricultural productivity. The same can probably be said for contemporary AI, but it's tough to tell right now. There's some scant indications we've scaled LLMs as far as they can go without another fundamental discovery similar to the attention paper in 2017. GPT-5 was underwhelming, and each new Claude Opus is an incremental improvement at best, still unable to execute an entire business idea from a single prompt. If we don't continue to see large leaps in capability like circa 2021-2022, then it can be argued jevons paradox will kick in here and at best LLMs will be a productivity multiplier for already experienced white collar workers - not a replacement for them. All this being said, technological unemployment is not something that will be sudden or obvious, nor will human innovation always stay under jevons paradox, and I think policymakers need to seriously entertain taboo solutions for it sooner or later. Such as a WPA-style infrastructure project or basic income.

renewiltord 10mo ago
Basic income doesn’t do anything. We already have food stamps and so on. The largest sector of US federal spending is health and social welfare. We’d have to end pretty much all those programs to run a minuscule basic income.
- dymk 10mo ago
  That’s a matter of where you get your taxes from. Plenty of corporations can afford to pay a more fair share. And studies on basic income have so far shown it to be effective.
  - jlawson 10mo ago
    Studies on basic income have shown that it's harmful to the people who receive it. They report no improvements on any measured outcome. Not lower stress, not more education, not better health. They work a bit less but that doesn't help them or their kids. Over the long term it harms them because their productive skills, values, and emotional capacities atrophy away from lack of use.
    - RobertoG 10mo ago
      what studies are those?
    - ragazzina 10mo ago
      > Studies on basic income have shown that it's harmful to the people who receive it. That's extremely interesting, can you link such studies?
      - jlawson 10mo ago
        This podcast covers a bunch of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5nj3DLvT64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5nj3DLvT64 It's one of those things that can be tricky to research because almost all the researchers and journalists on the topic very much don't want to see this conclusion. So there's a tremendous amount of misrepresentation and wishful reasoning about how to interpret the data. The truth comes out from actually reading the data, not researcher or journalist summaries.
    - Analemma_ 10mo ago
      What’s the alternative, if AI does turn out to be able to replace large swathes of the workforce? Just kill everyone? You could ban it and then turn all existing employment into a makework jobs program, but this doesn’t seem sustainable: work you know is pointless is just as psychically corrosive, and in any event companies will just leave for less-regulated shores where AI is allowed.
    - ororoo 10mo ago
      "Final verdict on Finland's basic income trial: More happiness but little employment effect" https://yle.fi/a/3-11337944 https://yle.fi/a/3-11337944 https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/fair-society/universal-basic-income-experiment-finland-new-research-reveals-significant-diversity-participants-experience https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/fair-society/universal-basic... so basic income caused more happiness, less stress. but those are not profitable things, so, no basic income in finland.
    - NickC25 10mo ago
      >Over the long term it harms them Yes, but not for the reasons you state. It harms them because we have an zero desire as a society to effectively combat inflation, which negates any benefits we can give people who receive the basic income. The powers-that-be don't take action to make sure the people who get basic income can actually use it to improve their lives. Food prices rapidly inflate, education costs skyrocket, medical costs increase exponentially almost overnight. Much like how the government backstopping student loans basically got university costs to jump, promising to give people a basic income while not addressing the root causes of inequality and wealth disparity just makes things worse. If you want basic income to truly work, you have to engage in some activities in the short term that are inherently un-capitalistic, although if done correctly, actually improve capitalism as a whole for society. Price controls and freezes, slashing executive pay, increasing taxes on the wealthiest, etc.
  - philipallstar 10mo ago
    If everything's automated then you don't need taxes to pay people.
    - dymk 10mo ago
      Let me know when we live in The Culture, but I’ve got a feeling fully automated luxury gay space communism is a long ways off
      - philipallstar 10mo ago
        Then what's the problem? AI is a problem (apparently) if everything is automated. Otherwise people have jobs and carry on as before.
        int_19h 10mo ago
        Imagine a society that is halfway to that. So, say, there are only enough jobs for half of the people, but the rest still want to eat.
  - philipallstar 10mo ago
    > Plenty of corporations can afford to pay a more fair share Can we stop pretending with the word "fair"? If you want to squeeze out more money then you do it by force. It's not "fair". It's just "we can do this".
- zwnow 10mo ago
  Whats the alternative? Kill off all humans replaced by AI unable to do something else for a living? Its sad enough that there are food stamps given the amount of food that regularly ends up in a dumpster on a daily basis. Humans come first, not machinery.
  - AndrewKemendo 10mo ago
    Nobody needs to kill anyone, people will just stop having kids which is what’s happening
    - zwnow 10mo ago
      Whats with the people already alive? If u continuously replace them with AI u need to support them in case of their inability to provide for themselves. Im afraid the worldwide available social security nets in place aren't made for withstanding this kind of unemployment.
      - AndrewKemendo 10mo ago
        They’ll have to adapt like every other generation has had to My grandmother was born in 1924 and died in 2019 please appreciate how much change she had to adapt to over that period
        zwnow 10mo ago
        Your grandma had plenty of opportunities in the post war eras. During her time there was always a need for human workers. While I dont think AI can actually replace anyone reliably, I still can see how executives buy into this promise and try it. This is a unique situation humanity never was confronted with. Even the industrialization required a lot of human work. If all white collar jobs went away there is a huge imbalance in available workers vs available work. Simply adapting to this isn't a thing given that monopolies killed competition and its not feasible for your everyday Joe to break into markets anymore. Kudos to your grandma for making it this long, simply not a comparable situation however.
- lotsofpulp 10mo ago
  >The largest sector of US federal spending is health and social welfare. On old people who can't or don't work.
  - enigma101 10mo ago
    they will likely die first when society collapses
- NoMoreNicksLeft 10mo ago
  The people who own the magical AIs won't decide that they want to keep us all as pets, we won't have leverage to demand that they keep us all as pets, and they will have the resources to make sure they no longer need to keep us as pets. Shouting "You should keep humans as pets" is unlikely to change this fundamental equation.
- wongarsu 10mo ago
  > We’d have to end pretty much all those programs to run a minuscule basic income Isn't ending all those programs one of the core ideas of universal basic income? Instead of having a huge bureaucracy administering targeted social welfare you cut all the overhead and just pay everyone enough to exist, regardless of whether you actually need it. It'd still be more expensive, but giving people something dependable to fall back on would hopefully increase innovation and entrepreneurship, offsetting some of the costs
  - renewiltord 10mo ago
    Okay so let’s divide the US federal budget by the number of people. So $21k per person. Now what happens to the guy who needs dialysis. It costs $60k. Right now the federal government pays. Now it’s given him a third the cost back. He just dies?
    - adamauckland 10mo ago
      He gets it on the healthcare like all developed nations.
CyanLite2 10mo ago
I think you're basing AI only on modern 2025 LLMs. If there is a magnitude increase in compute (TPUs, NPUs, etc) over the next 3-5 years then even marginal increases in LLM usability will take white collar jobs. If there is an exponential increase in power (fusion) and compute (quantum) combined with improvements in robotics and you're in the territory where humans can entirely be replaced in all industries (blue collar, white collar, doctors, lawyers, etc).
- xmcqdpt2 10mo ago
  OTOH if there is worldwide catastrophic economic collapse due to climate change none of these things will get built. In French we say "With "ifs" you can put Paris in a bottle."
- notyourwork 10mo ago
  Where does all the power come from? Compute increases have to has sustainable power source and we don’t have that.
lelandfe 10mo ago
> technological unemployment is not something that will be sudden or obvious I already have friends experiencing technological unemployment. Programmers suddenly need backup plans. Several designers I know are changing careers. Not to mention, the voiceover artist profession will probably cease to exist besides this last batch of known voices. Writer, editor - these were dependable careers for friends, once. A friend travelled the world and did freelance copyediting for large clients. ChatGPT was just released three years ago.
- twodave 10mo ago
  People keep trying to tie these two things together, forgetting the fact that ZIRP also ended 3 years ago, and that combined with the end of the COVID-era employer credits are when the layoffs really began. I won't say LLMs are having no impact at all on employment, but not to the degree where the job pool has dried up. Companies were encouraged to over-hire for years, and now that the free money is gone, they're acting logically. I believe if ZIRP came back we'd see workforces expand again and AI would just be seen as another useful tool.
  - johnebgd 10mo ago
    The mishandling of how they rewrote section 174 of the tax code also caused a lot of layoffs of developers.
    - physicsguy 10mo ago
      Only in the US but ZIRP and redundancies have been worldwide
  - echelon 10mo ago
    ZIRP, IRS Section 174, and irrationally exuberant over hiring caused the first few rounds of layoffs. The layoffs you see now are due to offshoring disguised as AI taking over. Google, Amazon, and even Hollywood are getting in on the offshoring craze.
- philipallstar 10mo ago
philipallstar 10mo ago
> The same can probably be said for contemporary AI, but it's tough to tell right now The same can't even be said for contemporary AI, because lots of the jobs it's going to replace are theoretical or hype. Self-driving cars should've been here years ago, but because AI is extremely hard to improve upon once it gets to a certain level of efficacy, they haven't happened. The question is: should we be discussing this stuff when AI hasn't started taking all those jobs yet?
- Ajedi32 10mo ago
  I think it's fine to discuss solutions to hypothetical future problems as long as it's clear that these are hypothetical future problems you're talking about, not present reality. In many of these discussions that line seems to get blurred and I start to get the impression people are using the specter of a vague, poorly understood hypothetical future problem to argue for concrete societal changes now.
NoMoreNicksLeft 10mo ago
>The same can probably be said for contemporary AI, but it's tough to tell right now. There's some scant indications we've scaled LLMs as far as they can go without another fundamental discovery similar to the attention paper in 2017. GPT-5 was underwhelming, and each new Claude Opus is an incremental improvement at best, still unable to execute an entire business idea from a single prompt. If we don't continue to see large leaps in capability like circa 2021-2022, then it can be argued jevons paradox will kick in here and at best LLMs will be a productivity multiplier for already experienced white collar workers - not a replacement for them. The NBA has an incredibly high demand for 14-foot-tall basketball players, but none have shown up to apply. Similarly, if this causes our economy to increase demand for people to "execute an entire business ide from a single prompt", it does not mean unemployment can be alleviated by moving all the jobless into roles like that. We don't need science fiction AI that will put everyone out of work for it to be ruinous. We only need half-assed AI good enough that they don't want to pay a burgerflipper to flip burgers anymore, and it'll all go to hell.
Ajedi32 10mo ago
> This argument hinges rather strongly on whether or not AI is going to create a broad, durable, and lasting unemployment effect. I think GP's argument makes a pretty strong case that it won't, even if AI somehow successfully automates 99% of all currently existing tasks. We automated away 99% of jobs once during the agricultural revolution and it didn't result in "a broad, durable, and lasting unemployment effect" then. Quite the opposite in fact. Maybe if AI actually automates 100% of everything then we'll need to think about this more. But that seems unlikely to happen anytime in the foreseeable future given the current trajectory of the technology. (Even 50% seems unlikely.)
falcor84 10mo ago
> each new Claude Opus is an incremental improvement at best, still unable to execute an entire business idea from a single prompt. If your way of evaluating the progress of AI is a binary one, then you'll see no progress at all until suddenly it passes that bar. But seeing that we do have incremental improvements on essentially all evals (and my own experience), even if it takes another decade we should be planning for it now. Even if it does require an entirely fundamental breakthrough like the attention paper, given the amount of researchers working on it, and capital devoted to it, I wouldn't put any money against such a breakthrough arriving before long.
pyrolistical 10mo ago
When most of the human population were farmers should we have taxed advances in agriculture which destroyed the everybody’s job?
- techblueberry 10mo ago
  Yes
NedF 10mo ago
[dead]

by ashleyn 10mo ago

renewiltord 10mo ago

Basic income doesn’t do anything. We already have food stamps and so on. The largest sector of US federal spending is health and social welfare. We’d have to end pretty much all those programs to run a minuscule basic income.

dymk 10mo ago
That’s a matter of where you get your taxes from. Plenty of corporations can afford to pay a more fair share. And studies on basic income have so far shown it to be effective.
- jlawson 10mo ago
  Studies on basic income have shown that it's harmful to the people who receive it. They report no improvements on any measured outcome. Not lower stress, not more education, not better health. They work a bit less but that doesn't help them or their kids. Over the long term it harms them because their productive skills, values, and emotional capacities atrophy away from lack of use.
  - RobertoG 10mo ago
    what studies are those?
  - ragazzina 10mo ago
    > Studies on basic income have shown that it's harmful to the people who receive it. That's extremely interesting, can you link such studies?
    - jlawson 10mo ago
      This podcast covers a bunch of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5nj3DLvT64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5nj3DLvT64 It's one of those things that can be tricky to research because almost all the researchers and journalists on the topic very much don't want to see this conclusion. So there's a tremendous amount of misrepresentation and wishful reasoning about how to interpret the data. The truth comes out from actually reading the data, not researcher or journalist summaries.
  - Analemma_ 10mo ago
    What’s the alternative, if AI does turn out to be able to replace large swathes of the workforce? Just kill everyone? You could ban it and then turn all existing employment into a makework jobs program, but this doesn’t seem sustainable: work you know is pointless is just as psychically corrosive, and in any event companies will just leave for less-regulated shores where AI is allowed.
  - ororoo 10mo ago
    "Final verdict on Finland's basic income trial: More happiness but little employment effect" https://yle.fi/a/3-11337944 https://yle.fi/a/3-11337944 https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/fair-society/universal-basic-income-experiment-finland-new-research-reveals-significant-diversity-participants-experience https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/fair-society/universal-basic... so basic income caused more happiness, less stress. but those are not profitable things, so, no basic income in finland.
  - NickC25 10mo ago
    >Over the long term it harms them Yes, but not for the reasons you state. It harms them because we have an zero desire as a society to effectively combat inflation, which negates any benefits we can give people who receive the basic income. The powers-that-be don't take action to make sure the people who get basic income can actually use it to improve their lives. Food prices rapidly inflate, education costs skyrocket, medical costs increase exponentially almost overnight. Much like how the government backstopping student loans basically got university costs to jump, promising to give people a basic income while not addressing the root causes of inequality and wealth disparity just makes things worse. If you want basic income to truly work, you have to engage in some activities in the short term that are inherently un-capitalistic, although if done correctly, actually improve capitalism as a whole for society. Price controls and freezes, slashing executive pay, increasing taxes on the wealthiest, etc.
- philipallstar 10mo ago
  If everything's automated then you don't need taxes to pay people.
  - dymk 10mo ago
    Let me know when we live in The Culture, but I’ve got a feeling fully automated luxury gay space communism is a long ways off
    - philipallstar 10mo ago
      Then what's the problem? AI is a problem (apparently) if everything is automated. Otherwise people have jobs and carry on as before.
      - int_19h 10mo ago
        Imagine a society that is halfway to that. So, say, there are only enough jobs for half of the people, but the rest still want to eat.
- philipallstar 10mo ago
  > Plenty of corporations can afford to pay a more fair share Can we stop pretending with the word "fair"? If you want to squeeze out more money then you do it by force. It's not "fair". It's just "we can do this".
zwnow 10mo ago
Whats the alternative? Kill off all humans replaced by AI unable to do something else for a living? Its sad enough that there are food stamps given the amount of food that regularly ends up in a dumpster on a daily basis. Humans come first, not machinery.
- AndrewKemendo 10mo ago
  Nobody needs to kill anyone, people will just stop having kids which is what’s happening
  - zwnow 10mo ago
    Whats with the people already alive? If u continuously replace them with AI u need to support them in case of their inability to provide for themselves. Im afraid the worldwide available social security nets in place aren't made for withstanding this kind of unemployment.
    - AndrewKemendo 10mo ago
      They’ll have to adapt like every other generation has had to My grandmother was born in 1924 and died in 2019 please appreciate how much change she had to adapt to over that period
      - zwnow 10mo ago
        Your grandma had plenty of opportunities in the post war eras. During her time there was always a need for human workers. While I dont think AI can actually replace anyone reliably, I still can see how executives buy into this promise and try it. This is a unique situation humanity never was confronted with. Even the industrialization required a lot of human work. If all white collar jobs went away there is a huge imbalance in available workers vs available work. Simply adapting to this isn't a thing given that monopolies killed competition and its not feasible for your everyday Joe to break into markets anymore. Kudos to your grandma for making it this long, simply not a comparable situation however.
lotsofpulp 10mo ago
>The largest sector of US federal spending is health and social welfare. On old people who can't or don't work.
- enigma101 10mo ago
  they will likely die first when society collapses
NoMoreNicksLeft 10mo ago
The people who own the magical AIs won't decide that they want to keep us all as pets, we won't have leverage to demand that they keep us all as pets, and they will have the resources to make sure they no longer need to keep us as pets. Shouting "You should keep humans as pets" is unlikely to change this fundamental equation.
wongarsu 10mo ago
> We’d have to end pretty much all those programs to run a minuscule basic income Isn't ending all those programs one of the core ideas of universal basic income? Instead of having a huge bureaucracy administering targeted social welfare you cut all the overhead and just pay everyone enough to exist, regardless of whether you actually need it. It'd still be more expensive, but giving people something dependable to fall back on would hopefully increase innovation and entrepreneurship, offsetting some of the costs
- renewiltord 10mo ago
  Okay so let’s divide the US federal budget by the number of people. So $21k per person. Now what happens to the guy who needs dialysis. It costs $60k. Right now the federal government pays. Now it’s given him a third the cost back. He just dies?
  - adamauckland 10mo ago
    He gets it on the healthcare like all developed nations.

CyanLite2 10mo ago

I think you're basing AI only on modern 2025 LLMs. If there is a magnitude increase in compute (TPUs, NPUs, etc) over the next 3-5 years then even marginal increases in LLM usability will take white collar jobs. If there is an exponential increase in power (fusion) and compute (quantum) combined with improvements in robotics and you're in the territory where humans can entirely be replaced in all industries (blue collar, white collar, doctors, lawyers, etc).

xmcqdpt2 10mo ago
OTOH if there is worldwide catastrophic economic collapse due to climate change none of these things will get built. In French we say "With "ifs" you can put Paris in a bottle."
notyourwork 10mo ago
Where does all the power come from? Compute increases have to has sustainable power source and we don’t have that.

lelandfe 10mo ago

> technological unemployment is not something that will be sudden or obvious I already have friends experiencing technological unemployment. Programmers suddenly need backup plans. Several designers I know are changing careers. Not to mention, the voiceover artist profession will probably cease to exist besides this last batch of known voices. Writer, editor - these were dependable careers for friends, once. A friend travelled the world and did freelance copyediting for large clients. ChatGPT was just released three years ago.

twodave 10mo ago
People keep trying to tie these two things together, forgetting the fact that ZIRP also ended 3 years ago, and that combined with the end of the COVID-era employer credits are when the layoffs really began. I won't say LLMs are having no impact at all on employment, but not to the degree where the job pool has dried up. Companies were encouraged to over-hire for years, and now that the free money is gone, they're acting logically. I believe if ZIRP came back we'd see workforces expand again and AI would just be seen as another useful tool.
- johnebgd 10mo ago
  The mishandling of how they rewrote section 174 of the tax code also caused a lot of layoffs of developers.
  - physicsguy 10mo ago
    Only in the US but ZIRP and redundancies have been worldwide
- echelon 10mo ago
  ZIRP, IRS Section 174, and irrationally exuberant over hiring caused the first few rounds of layoffs. The layoffs you see now are due to offshoring disguised as AI taking over. Google, Amazon, and even Hollywood are getting in on the offshoring craze.
philipallstar 10mo ago

philipallstar 10mo ago

> The same can probably be said for contemporary AI, but it's tough to tell right now The same can't even be said for contemporary AI, because lots of the jobs it's going to replace are theoretical or hype. Self-driving cars should've been here years ago, but because AI is extremely hard to improve upon once it gets to a certain level of efficacy, they haven't happened. The question is: should we be discussing this stuff when AI hasn't started taking all those jobs yet?

Ajedi32 10mo ago
I think it's fine to discuss solutions to hypothetical future problems as long as it's clear that these are hypothetical future problems you're talking about, not present reality. In many of these discussions that line seems to get blurred and I start to get the impression people are using the specter of a vague, poorly understood hypothetical future problem to argue for concrete societal changes now.

NoMoreNicksLeft 10mo ago

>The same can probably be said for contemporary AI, but it's tough to tell right now. There's some scant indications we've scaled LLMs as far as they can go without another fundamental discovery similar to the attention paper in 2017. GPT-5 was underwhelming, and each new Claude Opus is an incremental improvement at best, still unable to execute an entire business idea from a single prompt. If we don't continue to see large leaps in capability like circa 2021-2022, then it can be argued jevons paradox will kick in here and at best LLMs will be a productivity multiplier for already experienced white collar workers - not a replacement for them. The NBA has an incredibly high demand for 14-foot-tall basketball players, but none have shown up to apply. Similarly, if this causes our economy to increase demand for people to "execute an entire business ide from a single prompt", it does not mean unemployment can be alleviated by moving all the jobless into roles like that. We don't need science fiction AI that will put everyone out of work for it to be ruinous. We only need half-assed AI good enough that they don't want to pay a burgerflipper to flip burgers anymore, and it'll all go to hell.

Ajedi32 10mo ago

> This argument hinges rather strongly on whether or not AI is going to create a broad, durable, and lasting unemployment effect. I think GP's argument makes a pretty strong case that it won't, even if AI somehow successfully automates 99% of all currently existing tasks. We automated away 99% of jobs once during the agricultural revolution and it didn't result in "a broad, durable, and lasting unemployment effect" then. Quite the opposite in fact. Maybe if AI actually automates 100% of everything then we'll need to think about this more. But that seems unlikely to happen anytime in the foreseeable future given the current trajectory of the technology. (Even 50% seems unlikely.)

falcor84 10mo ago

> each new Claude Opus is an incremental improvement at best, still unable to execute an entire business idea from a single prompt. If your way of evaluating the progress of AI is a binary one, then you'll see no progress at all until suddenly it passes that bar. But seeing that we do have incremental improvements on essentially all evals (and my own experience), even if it takes another decade we should be planning for it now. Even if it does require an entirely fundamental breakthrough like the attention paper, given the amount of researchers working on it, and capital devoted to it, I wouldn't put any money against such a breakthrough arriving before long.

pyrolistical 10mo ago

When most of the human population were farmers should we have taxed advances in agriculture which destroyed the everybody’s job?

techblueberry 10mo ago
Yes

NedF 10mo ago

[dead]